


Call It A Dying Man's Request

by Experi



Category: Fate/Zero, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, berserker is sakuras new dad now bc the standards are that low, canon-typical triggers, one day ill write the teamzerker family wholesome content i deserve but Not Today, welcome to hell welcome to hell welcome to hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:48:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23063473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Experi/pseuds/Experi
Summary: If there's no canon information for how Berserker and Kariya interacted with each other before/after major plot points then I have no option but to decide it myself, and my decision is that I'm going to do what I want and write Depressed Men Being Depressed, Together, And Sometimes With A Traumatized Eight Year Old, Disassociating.Berserker and Kariya talking at various points through canon. Also, Berserker and Sakura talking, because I want that too.A content-type companion to Of Flint And Pitch, though less "character study" more "I'll decide what's canon now, Urobuchi".
Relationships: Lancelot of the Lake | Berserker & Matou Sakura, Lancelot of the Lake | Berserker/Matou Kariya
Comments: 8
Kudos: 39





	Call It A Dying Man's Request

**Author's Note:**

> Various drabbles from my RP blog touched up and organized in linear fashion.  
> i SWEAR i have like TEN drafts in my google doc of everything from "kariya and berserker and sakura have a nice day in like 6 different AUs" to "kariya Gets Dicked" and yet, this is what i offer instead??this is what i have?? more of the same??what am i doing.
> 
> The title is from Letters To My Lover The Dylan Fan, a song which makes me emo

_I'm still here, and all is lost._

“ Who is that?” Berserker asks silently, interrupting Kariya’s thoughts with his own.

“Sakura,” Kariya replies aloud, but quietly. “This war is to save her. Fight for her sake.”

Sakura turns at the sound of Kariya’s voice, likely under the assumption that he’s speaking to her. A question begins to form on her lips, but Berserker takes the opportunity to manifest in answer, ignoring the pained inhale from Kariya as he does so. The girl doesn’t flinch at all, or even react, just stares at Berserker with the blank stare she’s had this whole time.

He takes a few steps forward, out from behind his Master, to kneel before Sakura with his hand extended towards her. Nothing changes in her countenance. “You’re… what Kariya summoned?” she asks quietly, her voice coming forth as if echoing over an insurmountable gulf. 

“Yes,” Berserker answers, coherent enough.

Sakura lays her hand delicately upon Berserker’s, and it feels like she is a doll that someone else is puppeteering. Perhaps she is lost, but it will take more than him to help her. They both know this. “Be careful of grandfather,” she says, looking to Berserker’s face as if the helm and fog aren’t there and she can easily meet his eyes.

“I don’t fear him.” To Berserker it’s something like this: he’d like to say that he could protect her if she wanted, but he offers the truth instead, as minuscule as it is. He’s never been one for lying. She can take what she wishes from it. 

Sakura nods minutely and then slips her hand from Berserker’s. “Neither does Uncle. You two should still be careful.” Her eyes meet Berserker’s gaze directly, and she does not even minutely flinch away from the lurid glow of his curse and the biting despair within. He gives her a nod in return, and Sakura walks away without further comment, disappearing down the hallway like she’s already a ghost.

Berserker stands and returns to Kariya’s side before dematerializing. “She doesn’t fear me,” Berserker informs him with a mourning sort of wistfulness.

“Neither do I,” Kariya replies, stubborn over something-or-other that Berserker doesn’t have the inclination to figure out.

“Do you really think that you’re so well-off that someone sharing a trait with you is a good thing?”

Kariya falls silent at that, watching the empty hallway for a long while before he finally sighs and turns away.

* * *

Berserker don’t watch Kariya when he stumbles into the church. He can’t. It’s too much, too personal, too familiar, the rising sense of regret like bile in his throat as Kariya acts out a role it’s too late to avert. It was always going to end like this, and he knew it. Instead Berserker remains dematerialized and watches only the figure on the second story, who eyes the scene from the transept like it’s the climax of a play. Perhaps it is. Berserker’s not one to judge that – he just watches Kariya under the ostensible excuse of protection, guarding his Master from the only threat here that never mattered at all, and he knows it.

Attention only wavers from the overseer when Kariya hauls his way out and Berserker disappears with him, following like an invasive thought. Kariya finds himself in the street, curled over himself on the ground screaming something incoherent between his sobs. He screams at Berserker, too, when he materializes and hefts him impassionately up over his shoulder, wordless. Kariya weighs nothing, save the weight of scars, and it’s almost as if his hatred and regret and despair could melt right into Berserker’s own fog.

He screams himself raw, which doesn’t take long, and retches when Berserker puts him down in what might ostensibly be called his home. When Kariya finally manages to look at his Servant again, Berserker can’t tell if his gaze is accusing him specifically of betrayal or if it’s directed to the world at large. There’s nothing to say, so he doesn’t try.

Berserker just sits down next to him, and waits.

“Why,” Kariya asks eventually, once he’s ran out of tears and his throat can produce something other than cracked screaming. “Why.” Hoarse and broken, just a final plea.

There’s nothing Berserker can tell him. Nothing will make it better, he knows that this is merely a tragedy on loop and if he knew how to fix it he would have done something already, if he knew how to remove himself from the script set out, neither of them would be here. But an ‘I don’t know’ means nothing, so Berserker gives Kariya no reply, just sits next to him half-corporeal and hopes that the feeling of someone else’s weight provides some stable reminder of existence, as if that were enough. 

He isn’t sure, when Kariya’s breathing evens out, if it’s because he’s exhausted himself to sleep or because he’s fallen unconscious. 

* * *

There isn’t any light in the Matou house during the day. It’s not much difference between day and night in the mansion, especially not where Berserker manifests in the basement full of worms, which is always lit with the same sickly green light glowing from nowhere in particular. Kariya is secreted away in a dark corner, tucked somewhere Berserker hopes he won’t fall into anything worse than he already has. Berserker comes alone, when he knows he won’t be needed. Servant fights are best left for the night hours.

He crushes worms under his boots when he manifests and finds the popping noise deeply disgusting. He ignores the prone body of the girl lying dead on the ground, and she ignores him in return.

– No, she’s not dead. He knew that before, but she also shouldn’t be classed as dead in his thoughts. Even when she doesn’t blink and barely breathes, it still matters to Master that she lives. Berserker sits down in a heap of armour and tugs off his helmet. All that’s visible is a miasmic cloud, a black staticky fuzz that conceals nothing, only the vague concept of facial features exist, just enough to be functional. Berserker picks up a crest worm that seems the most like it’s well-fed and crushes its head between his fingers. 

It’s odd enough to attract Sakura’s attention. Her empty gaze shifts to him, and Berserker continues to ignore it. The worm disappears into the fog where Berserker’s head should be, followed shortly by the sound of swallowing. Sakura feels it’s strange and disgusting enough to make her feel the smallest amount of anything at all, enough to motivate her to speak once it seems like Berserker’s mouth, or whatever he has instead, is empty.

“Are you real?” She asks quietly, her voice reverberating hollowly around the open ceiling. 

Berserker makes a noise that sounds like a cross between a few short barks and the sound of crumpling metal, that Sakura only much later realizes was probably analogous to a laugh. “Maybe,” he says, his voice a low rumble. (Are nightmares real? Are demons? Can he tell anyone he’s real when this is only a dream he sleepwalks through and his mind belongs to something else?)

Sakura takes it as an answer nonetheless and chooses not to argue. If he’s real, then he’s real, if not, then he still seems to be here and that amounts to the same thing. She makes a barely-there noise of assent and closes her eyes. “I forgot you could talk. Is Uncle dead?” She’s never seen the shadow without the decaying form of Kariya preceding it. If Berserker’s here alone, then perhaps something’s happened…?

But Berserker shakes his head with a grunt. “I can if I’m low on energy. Kariya is sleeping. I’m hungry, he doesn’t appreciate me drinking his blood.” So he comes here, where the leylines center with a corrupted energy that’s easy for him to feed on and where the worms swarm full of mana. He picks another one up, crushes its head, and swallows it.

It tastes horrid, like decaying meat and festering wounds, all sick and bilious with the stench of rot. But it’s energy that doesn’t come at the price of killing his Master before Berserker has time to fight his King, and that’s enough. He’ll do whatever’s needed.

Sakura blinks at the ceiling. “Like the worms.” A parasite that needs to feed. Both created by Grandfather because he seems to fuel himself upon the sufferings of others. Sakura doesn’t mean it as a condemnation – Berserker is better than the worms by the sheer virtue of not seeming to be actively horrible, and Kariya presumably wanting him around. 

Berserker realizes that she doesn’t mean it as an insult, nor could a small child insult him in any way, but the sheer fact of comparison makes him scowl within the fog that comprises his face and body.

But she’s also correct enough. He offers a wordless noise of indistinct agreement. Sakura wriggles one of her arms free from the pile of worms writhing atop her and points at a noticeably fat one currently gnawing at her throat. “Eat this one.” It’s weighing down on her trachea, making inhaling mildly difficult.

Berserker does as ordered. It’s crushed and sent down whatever maw he has within the fog obediently. Sakura makes another quiet hum of thanks, exhaling slowly. The place the worm sat is taking up by another before Berserker even finished disposing of the first, but at least the replacement isn’t quite so big. It’s not quite so difficult to breathe. The pain is entirely filtered out with her, a dull distance from her own body that she doesn’t pay any mind to, but the inability to breathe easily will sometimes drag her back into her own body.

There’s quiet, where it seems vaguely as if Berserker’s watching her. It’s difficult to tell what he’s looking at, considering his head is a shapeless black cloud with only an ill-defined red glow that Sakura assumes is where his eyes are. 

She doesn’t know how much time passes, and nor does he. It’s difficult, in this place with no light and only the never-ending noise of pests. “Uncle’s going to die,” Sakura informs Berserker idly.

“Yes,” Berserker agrees.

It would be foolish to argue otherwise. He would like it if that weren’t the case, of course. Whatever Berserker is now, he still takes the mantle of a knight and would prefer if his charge should live, and he likes Kariya in an odd way. The man doesn’t deserve the fate that he created for himself. 

But it can’t be swayed now. The players are all on the field. The King is here, the fires are set, and Kariya bites out bloody sentences to Berserker, setting himself on fire in a desperate last-ditch attempt to make something happen. 

“You should tell him to stop fighting,” she says.

“I won’t.” Berserker rumbles that out, then has to pause to compose the rest of the sentence, marshal his thoughts back into am much a coherent order as he can. “I have a battle I wish to fight.” He must challenge his king. Even if he doesn’t get to finish the command to defeat Archer, he must fight Arthur. The reason he came here, to force the King’s hand, make her either hate him or kill him, find some kind of resolution. 

Berserker shifts uncomfortably and crushes a few worms under his hand to distract him from the currently buzzing thoughts of his King, the confusing miasma of anger and guilt. The fog buzzes as well, curling around at the edges. He refocuses his attention to Sakura again, if only to distract himself – he cannot leave to chase down Arthur now. It’s daylight, he shouldn’t get caught out here, and it would kill Kariya besides. “Are you sad?”

Sakura pauses to think. It’s been so long since anyone asked her if she was sad (or anything at all about her feelings) that she’s forgotten how to evaluate what she’s feeling, or even if she feels anything at all. Sadness…? “No,” she answers quietly. “It’s just a waste of time. He won’t get around Grandfather.” It’s an exercise in pointlessness. It all means nothing, and Kariya even had the opportunity to leave. He still could, if he stopped trying to fight this war for no reason at all.

Berserker makes the strange laughing noise again, crumpling metal and no humour at all. It’s bitter, defeated – even a beast like him knows too well the dogged persistence, refusal to give up, the clinging hope to help someone beloved even if it actively destroys you. “You’re smarter than him.” 

Than both of them, probably.

Berserker bites a worm in half and it makes him feel sick, despite the fact that he only has a physical body enough to process the worms into prana and not enough to vomit them back up. 

He stands with a creaking of armour. Sakura’s eyes flutter closed. “Are you leaving?” she asks him.

“Should I not?” Berserker replies. He’s not positive if he would actually listen if she asked him to stay, though he feels that the answer is ‘probably’. He’ll make up his mind only after she answers.

“No. Tell Uncle to let you have that fight you want and then leave here.”

Berserker grunts something that isn’t an answer. He doesn’t want to give her one, tell her that he can do a single thing to help her or anyone at all. Lying isn’t his business. Once again, Sakura decides to let the lack of answer pass her comment. He fades away as if caught in a breeze, dissolving into mist that leaves the air cold and sharp for a few minutes. Sakura sighs and shifts her attention back to the ceiling, letting her mind float back up to someplace else, where the sky’s clear and she isn’t anyone.

Well, at least someone here can talk sense. Maybe he’ll come say hello again.

* * *

Command seals are new. Berserker’s never had them used before, almost surprisingly (though his attention is quick to flicker to the King on the battlefield, Kariya’s also too far gone by those points to care what he does, and this is the only Grail War he’s ever been in). Unsurprisingly, Berserker comes to the conclusion that he doesn’t like them. Kariya’s hand glows and then fades, two of the red squiggles dying out as the shadows around his Servant roll and boil in clear anger. Berserker  _ told _ him this wasn’t how For Someone’s Glory worked, and he  _ told _ him that Rider had nothing to do with either of them, and yet –

And yet.

Kariya stares at Berserker with a fixed expression. It’s hard to sway him once he’s fixated on a goal, which is something his knight both knows and respects, but finds extremely irritating at the moment, when he tells Berserker to wear Rider’s face and get out.

“I - don’t - want - to.” Berserker snarls out in stubborn response, each word punctuated with sharp irritation. It’s the angriest Berserker’s been at him, the only time he felt genuinely collared, the command seals like an over-tight chokechain around his neck.

“You have to.” Kariya is clipped as well, unaffected. Distant, like someone barking out orders without ever actually seeing the situation at hand.

The shadows roil around Berserker, spiking up and giving him a surprisingly decent facsimile of Rider. It hurts to take this form, the furious buzzing in Berserker’s brain (bugs, bugs, isn’t it? Biting and painful, swarm without form, he can’t fucking  _ think _ ). The fog was never meant to be used like this and it complains when forced, command seals dragging Rider’s guise out and keeping it stuck there. 

Rider’s face must look strange, warped and glowing in a furious scowl.

“Says who?” it grumbles.

Kariya matches it with angry determination of his own. (Berserker’s forced to remember that this is a scar where a person once stood, an empty swatch, it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s easy to lead around a corpse.) “Me. The seals.” The seals burn as if a reminder, but that’s not the answer Berserker wants and Kariya knows that too. Iskandar’s face raises its lip at him in a silent snarl that manages to be intimidating even without Berserker’s oversized fangs, expectant and waiting. 

After a few seconds: “Kirei,” Kariya answers, and Berserker doesn’t bite back the furious, bitter laughter that bursts past his teeth.

Ah, the priest. Of course, of course he would continue puppeteering, and force Berserker to do something like this. It’s too late for him to do anything else, and besides: the command seals have been laid. Ignoble and wrong as it may be, he’s stuck. Berserker stands, at least enjoying the feature of Rider’s height that lets him continue to loom over Kariya, still oversized and intimidating. “Fine,” Berserker bites out before disappearing, the word falling bitter to the ground.

Irritating, irritating. The things he does for a war they both know neither of them will win.

(Berserker will forgive him, of course, Kariya is merely buffeted around in the same ocean his Servant is. But sulking makes him feel better. Gives him something to concentrate on other than the pain and skittering dysphoria currently over his body.  _ Damn bastards _ , Berserker thinks.  _ All three of us, Master and priest and my horrid fool self _ .)

* * *

There’s no map, but the directions Kariya gives are simple enough. A few streets away, off to the side of the city, somewhere in the depths of a parking complex where weapons have been left behind for Berserker. Unobtrusive, an easy place to stage both an ambush and a battle. 

Kariya sighs and closes his eyes when he finishes describing where the parking garage is. “Go there,” he says, leaning back against the concrete wall, “and fight the King.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Kirei told me.”

Berserker knows better than him, he knows that the priest is a liar. But what good would it do to say that? Going to the King is what he’s fought for all along. Besides, Kariya is attached the the priest – one show of kindness, or even showing a lack of blatant dislike towards Kariya is enough to earn that, considering how rare either are – and Berserker has no inclination to remove that one minor consolation prize from him, no matter how falsified it may be. No matter who it was that stood at the transept and watched. 

It also serves Berserker’s purposes just fine. The king is the reason he came here, the reason he took this form, and informing Kariya anything he might already suspect will only distance him from that. So, Berserker stands, metal shifting. “Alright.”

“I’ll stay here,” Kariya says, and smiles up at Berserker, tight and forced and barely a smile. Perhaps just a side effect of the scarring in the light.

“Alright.” A pause. 

Kariya says he stays because it’s the closest he can get to the leyline without being eaten. Both of them know better. He stays there mostly because the walls are soundproofed and he knows how badly the fighting will hurt, and he stays because it will be easiest to clean up his body when it’s here. Just kick it into the pit. No one will have to see him die, this way. Because he knows this is where they both die, and so does Berserker. There’s nothing else from here – and if there were, who would chase it? There is no Tohsaka family for Sakura to return to; Kariya failed, so chasing the grail loses all direction, only a mad aimless flailing guided by Kirei and Kariya’s lack of understanding. Berserker chases nothing but the King. The only option left for either is to die, and hope that it might mean something to someone one day – or at least, not hurt anyone any more than living already has.

Berserker stands and bows to his Master, and then he leaves with only a quiet murmur left behind. “Farewell.”

“You, too, Lancelot.” Kariya might have smiled, once.

What an unfortunate joke this is.

**Author's Note:**

> feel free to egg me on to finish any of my NOT depressing basakari fics, if u wish to see them, which run the gamut from "everyone lives and is fine au" to "nokken au" to "demonfucking", so like. hrm.
> 
> Also feel free to hit me up on twitter over on @durindanna !


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